I’ve always had a bad opinion of people who try to chide little kids who use words like runned instead of ran. I’d always argued the kid successfully extrapolated past tense words end with a hard d sound and haven’t gotten to deeper English classes to learn the special scenarios for words like run or drink.
If you track how kids perform at this, you actually find a bathtub curve. When they are really young and just learning words, they are actually quite good at irregular conjunctions (for the few words they know). Then, as they get older and learn a bunch of other words, they start messing up the irregular ones they used to get right. Then, of course, they eventually learn the exceptions as exceptions.
You are correct; the “correct” way to correct speech issues like this is to repeat their story back to them using the correct wording.
For my 4yo, currently he is saying hims rather than his. Rather than saying in a corrective way “his, is how you say that, not hims”; you repeat the story, “oh, that is his tractor!”.
I’ve always had a bad opinion of people who try to chide little kids who use words like runned instead of ran. I’d always argued the kid successfully extrapolated past tense words end with a hard d sound and haven’t gotten to deeper English classes to learn the special scenarios for words like run or drink.
If you track how kids perform at this, you actually find a bathtub curve. When they are really young and just learning words, they are actually quite good at irregular conjunctions (for the few words they know). Then, as they get older and learn a bunch of other words, they start messing up the irregular ones they used to get right. Then, of course, they eventually learn the exceptions as exceptions.
You are correct; the “correct” way to correct speech issues like this is to repeat their story back to them using the correct wording.
For my 4yo, currently he is saying hims rather than his. Rather than saying in a corrective way “his, is how you say that, not hims”; you repeat the story, “oh, that is his tractor!”.